Out On a Limb(48)

And is it presumptuous to cook for us both? Or would it be rude to just cook for myself? When does he normally eat dinner? Is it already too late? Too early? I haven’t left my room since four, so there is the possibility that he’s already eaten by now. Though I don’t smell anything wafting from the kitchen, and my sense of smell since getting pregnant is no joke. I’m like a bloodhound these days. People could use me to solve crimes. Decade old unsolved cold cases.

If Bo did eat without me, would I be offended? I don’t mind if we do our own thing, but we should probably establish what our routine will be, right?

Then, there’s also the matter of how we get the food prior to cooking. Do we grocery shop together? Separately? What’s most economical? Will our system change when I’m on parental leave and my income is slashed in half?

“Win?” Bo calls through my door, knocking twice in quick succession.

“Hmm? Yeah?” I say, trying to present myself as calm. It’s unconvincing.

“Are you hungry? I made soup,” he replies, opening the door a crack and taking a step inside.

I pull my hair off my neck and swallow, feeling a hot flush across my chest and neck. This is all too much. There’s too much we haven’t discussed. Expectations I don’t know about and will inevitably fail. Jack hated when I didn’t have dinner ready when he got home. He was strange like that… performing long-winded monologues about how society was set to work against women while continuously making me feel like I had to fulfil certain roles and expectations in our home. Everything about Jack was some sort of performance.

Is that what this is? Bo making soup? Is this some sort of… act?

“You okay?” Bo asks, his eyes bouncing around my face, his hand tight around the top of my door.

I release my lip from between my teeth as my knee begins bouncing. “Do you have any allergies?” I ask.

“No.” Bo walks farther into the room, presses his shoulder against the wall next to my dresser, and crosses his arms. “What about you?”

“No. Do you normally cook or order in? What time do you eat? About now?”

“I like to cook, but I’m not any sort of chef. I normally eat around six since I finish work at five. Are you okay? You seem a little—”

“I feel like I’m unravelling, maybe… a tiny bit. I appreciate you cooking, obviously, but I just don’t know what the expectations are moving forward. I guess it’s been a while since I lived with someone…”

Bo nods thoughtfully, his eyes holding on the lamp on the bedside table. “This seems like the same spiral I was having about an hour ago.” He points to the bed, and I nod, shuffling over so he can sit next to me. “I don’t want to overstep,” Bo says, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands between his open legs. “If you want to share this space like roommates—buy our own food, cook for ourselves, share some basic necessities, split costs down the middle—that’s cool with me. But I think a different arrangement would make more sense.”

“Different?” I ask.

“Less separate, I guess. I think I worked out a solution for the bills and money side of things. As far as the household chores go, cooking or whatever else, I think we should take turns.”

“So, like, every other night, I’ll cook dinner?”

“But sometimes you close at the café, right? So why don’t I cook, since my schedule stays the same?”

“Then what do I do?”

“Clean up after dinner?”

“And what about the rest of the house? Do you keep things super clean? Do you have some sort of routine I should know about? A task you hate that I could do?”

“After my surgery, I hired a company to send someone to clean once a week, so it’s more just that we have to tidy up after ourselves.”

I add that to the list of expenses and wonder how much this home, Bo’s lifestyle, costs to maintain. Does he shop at the type of grocery stores with butcher counters and organic produce or the kind where you can buy lawn furniture alongside your milk? That may be a determining factor in how we proceed. Can I even afford half of his life?

“So what about money? Splitting everything in half seems right to me, but I don’t know what your bills are.”

“My suggestion is a bit more complicated than that.”

I raise a brow, waiting for him to continue.

Bo rises off the bed slightly, taking his phone out of his back pocket. “I know you said you wanted to pay half, and I don’t want to dismiss that, but I think this solution is something we can both agree on.” He holds out his phone between us, showing me a pie chart with a list of numbers below it that mean absolutely nothing to me.

I stare at it for a few long seconds before I give up. “What am I looking at here?”

He moves closer, our thighs touching, as he enthusiastically shows me around the screen. “Okay, this is our total yearly household income.” He circles the entire pie chart with his finger. “And this is the percentage of that income that I make.” He points to the much larger portion of the chart, coloured purple. His knee nudges mine, and I have to reset to focus on what he’s saying. I’m glad my math teachers weren’t as distractingly handsome as Bo. I’d have never gotten my diploma.

“This system splits everything proportionally. I put in our expected monthly expenses, including two additional savings accounts I’ve set up that we’ll both contribute to. One is for housing and moving costs you have in the future, whatever you decide to do. The second is for the baby—furniture, diapers, clothes, whatever else. I then multiplied the total of our expenses by each of our percentages to see how much each of us should contribute overall.”